The purpose of this blog is to provide analytical commentary on formal and informal labour organisations and their attempts to resist ever more brutal forms of exploitation in today’s neo-liberal, global capitalism.

Thursday, 9 February 2017

Employability is a powerful and increasingly dominant word within
the universities. Nottingham University is proud to be “ranked in the world top 100 Universities for employability”. This
is because students are now the main funder of universities. And
employability provides the answer to why the £9.250 tuition fees per year are
worth it – even if one needs to in-debt oneself for this investment.
Consequently, employability services
are not only spreading like wildfire but also academic staff is increasingly
pressurised to demonstrate in what ways their course facilitates students'
employability. For these employability educators the Precarious Workers
Brigade just published a book
called “Training for Exploitation? Politicising
Employability and Reclaiming Education” (a free pdf is available online). The book offers a
“critical resource pack to assist teachers and students in deconstructing dominant narratives around work, employability
and careers, and explores alternative ways of engaging with work and the
economy”. In this guest post Vera
Weghmann introduces the book by explaining what employability is and why it
needs to be politicised.

Employability

Most commonly employability is understood as the individual's ability to
adapt to the flexible labour market through the continuous
acquisition of skills and attributes. The post-2008 economic crisis and the
government's austerity policies not only led to serious job-losses but also
added fuel to the fear of unemployment, especially as social security
entitlements are continuously cut back. In these uncertain times, employability
promises employment security. The idea is, that if you remain attractive on the
labour market through lifelong learning, you are protected from unemployment.
Thereby, employability shifts the responsibility for employment from the state
onto the individual. However, 58 per cent, so the majority, of graduates in the
UK end up in non-graduate jobs.
In such a competitive graduate labour market, employability means for students
that a degree and good marks are simply not enough to land the desired job. Students
are under constant pressure to always perform more and better, to ever increase
their (work)-experience and to enhance continuously the labouring self in order
to demonstrate their (employ)ability. And mind you, the stress starts way
before they enter higher education.

The
Precarious Workers Brigade, therefore, argues that employability actually means
to learn what employers want and then to become it. As such,
employability normalises subordinating attitudes towards work and the self, it
promotes free labour and the hyper-individualised employability practices
discourage collective engagement and solidarity. Importantly, employability
should not be confused with employment: leaving the concrete employer/employee
relationship behind employability is the embodiment of work in workers everyday
lives and thereby extends capital’s control not only into the private sphere
but also into the development of the self. In sum, employability is a powerful
discourse that deflects from criticising the government and/or the current
capitalist system and instead nurtures a culture of self-blame.

Why politicise
employability?

Employability means that
employers became very present in the universities. There are career fairs that
allow “employers,
to raise [their] brand awareness on
campus and to promote internships” (Kingston University). Then there are
“industry panels”, where students get employability advise from potential
future employers and which are commonly “followed by networking opportunities
over refreshments” (Goldsmith University). And there are “employer-led workshops on skill development”, where employers
teach students the skills they want them to gain (Nottingham University). These
examples show that corporate interests play a more powerful role in a higher education system, which now has
the function to produce new workers in accordance with industry demands.

Conversely,
and most importantly, the employability activities do not prepare students for
the 'world of work' by teaching them their rights or by familiarising them with
the concept of collective bargaining and the functions of industrial actions.
Trade unions are completely absent from employability teachings in higher
education. In sum, future workers are educated at the universities, who first
and foremost learn to subordinate themselves to capital and not to challenge
it.

Employability - more than
skills

To understand what exactly shapes the becoming of these new
workers it is useful to see
in more detail what kind of employability training and workshops career centres
provide. One look at the programmes reveals that employability training goes
very much beyond advise on application writing, preparation for interviews and
skill development. Moreover, students are encouraged to develop an
employability-habitus: There are workshops in which students learn to modify their body language to “not only appeal more to an
employer, but to increase your [the student's] confidence too!” Other sessions
on networking teach students “how to break into conversations (and leave them)”
(Kingston University). In other words, the employability-habitus embodies stereotypical masculine gender norms of the confident
alpha-male, who has learned to dominate conversations by interrupting and
departing from them in accordance to his interest. Yet, as
employability is always presented as a neutral set of skills, attributes and
attitudes the employability discourse encourages individuals to see their
personal identities, such as gender, class, race and age, as irrelevant.

Employability promotes free and
low paid labour

Unpaid internship in the
private sector are not only illegal but also highly unpopular – according to
the Sutton Trust 70% of all 16 to 76 year olds in England believe
that unpaid internships are unfair because only the wealthy are able to work
for free. The universities career and employability centres are therefore
cautious not to advertise unpaid internships – unless they are in charities. As
I showed elsewhere this exploitation for a good cause
still seems to be acceptable.

Free
and low paid labour is nonetheless encouraged by the career and employability
centres, as students are advised that “any
work experience improves one's employability” (Goldsmith University) as
“even modest jobs like bar work or shelf stacking can demonstrate to employers
that you [the student] have a responsible attitude to work” and should be seen
as a chance to develop the right “work-habit” (Kingston University).

This
shows, that the employability agenda is not only tightly linked to unpaid
labour but also entails a disciplinary function as the student is encouraged to
develop a “work-habit” of subordination by gratefully accepting any job on
offer no matter its usefulness, conditions or pay.

And employability, thereby, replaces jobs

In
the hype for work-experience one form of free labour chases the other.
Volunteering is often a precondition for an unpaid internship, and often
students undertake several of those before they get a paid one – all in the
hope for a graduate job. The opportunities to work for free further entrench
labour market inequalities. Research suggests that female interns are more
often unpaid and more frequently tasked with admin work
– while their male counterparts are occupied with content. But, as Marx
reminded us, what is worse than being exploited, is not to be exploited.
Student's with a traditional working class or migrant background in post-1992
universities report extreme
difficulties in finding unpaid internships. Volunteering is here especially
advised to ease the access into internships.

To
increase the students' career prospects student unions are now often in charge
of brokering voluntary positions. Some run volunteering data-bases,
where not only the positions are advertised but also the available time slots.
Social media outreach and marketing, charity fundraising and receptionist work
are among frequent jobs advertised. It is easy to see that a few volunteers
replace paid, full time jobs. This begs the question if employability is
decreasing or increasing unemployment?

The book “Training for
Exploitation” by the Precarious Workers Brigade argues that there is nothing
wrong with work-based education and shows how to
“critique and organise against a system that is at the heart of the
contemporary crises of work, student debt and precarity”.

It encourages alternatives
to the existing learning about work by putting solidarity back in the front line.
By recognising our inter-dependence with others solidarity practices are linked
to justice and equality. The book suggests educating future workers by
incorporating an analysis of working conditions, collective bargaining and ways
to recognise and help each other. As such, it suggests an alternative to
applying a neoliberal logic to work, where everyone you meet is either seen as
competition or a networking opportunity.

Training for Exploitation
by the Precarious Workers Brigade thus prompts teachers to use the space
created by employability teachings to think and learn critically about work.

1 comment:

“Even modest jobs like bar work or shelf stacking can demonstrate to employers that you [the student] have a responsible attitude to work" > Nothing wrong with that. These jobs are useful, if conditions and pay are right, yes, employers should reward who did them. Better an employer who rewards people who had these jobs (which people do because they need the money and they do not do for free!), than an employer who prefers people who never did bar work but have lots of great FREE internships on their CV - internships they could do for free because their family is rich. Getting rid of unpaid internships should be the priority, not discouraging or devaluing students/graduates who do shelf stacking so they can EAT!